


mockingbird

by isawet



Category: Haven - Fandom
Genre: Backstory, F/M, Family, Gen, Season/Series 03 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-02
Updated: 2013-09-02
Packaged: 2017-12-25 09:34:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/951518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isawet/pseuds/isawet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>James, from Sara to Audrey and all his mothers in between.</p>
            </blockquote>





	mockingbird

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dahlia_Moon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dahlia_Moon/gifts).



Sara sings James lullabies at night, her hand pressed above his heart so she can feel his chest rise and fall with every breath, the tiny thump of his heart against her palm. Her lips are dry when she brushes them across his closed eyes.

//

When James is small he likes to play with his mother’s curls, twisting them around his chubby fingers as she hums to him. By the time he’s ten he’s tall enough to tug at the ends of them when he wants her attention, dodging when she swats at him.

“Your father couldn’t keep his hands off my hair either,” she says, tightening the twist of her curlers, and James holds his breath in the hopes of more about his father. More than the way he wore his hat or the funny way he talked. But she just smiles at him and reminds him to eat his vegetables, so he’ll grow just as tall as his father. If he asks it’s worse—her eyes go funny and her mouth pulls down at one corner, the same way it does when she watches the news and they recite the names of the dead and the missing.  
James tells everyone his father died in the war, and it’s a common enough story that no one bats an eyelash.

//

Sara disappears on James’ seventeenth birthday, somewhere between when she lit the candles on his cake and the squeak of the screen door as James comes in the kitchen. The indent of her weight is still in the plastic vinyl covered chair when James puts his hand into it, feels the heat of her body as it fades away.

//

Here’s what no one remembers but James: he grew up in Haven. He went to Haven Elementary, he played pitcher for Haven’s Little League team, tackle for Haven High. And every year their eyes would slide over him a little bit more, like oil on water. When he graduates high school there’s a diploma for him, but his principal checks his name three times against the list of students, even though Mr. Riponalo was his homeroom teacher for two whole years.

It’s like when his mother left she slipped right out of the minds of everyone in Haven, like butter off the new no-stick pans in the general store, and slow but sure James is following right after. _My name is James_ he writes in a notebook. _My mother was Sara, my father was Nathan._ He writes everything he can remember from what his mother let slip--that she knew his father for only a day, that he left her on a beach with the wind in her hair and James not even the size of a peanut, already inside her.

//

Lucy has long straight hair. Her eyes are darker. James remembers Sara used to catch spiders in paper Dixie cups and release them outside. He remembers crouching in the entryway of their tiny house with his mother making tiny trails of soda crackers to lead the mice into the bushes.

James calls Lucy mom the first time he sees her and she threatens him with a butter knife, suspicion in every line of her body.

//

James meets Arla at a diner. She gets his order wrong, double pickles instead of none, and he can’t keep the scowl off his face, the cherry on top of his shitty day. She props her hands on her waist and chews him out, tells him she’s more than a pretty blonde waitress getting old at a grease joint. James thinks sourly that blonde is the only colour he hasn’t met his mother in, and that’s enough to make him laugh despite himself, the absurdity of it.

“It’s my birthday,” he tells her, and she raises an eyebrow.

“Whoop de fucking do,” she says, but comes out of the kitchen a few minutes later with a beat to shit wax candle stuck into a short stack. “Make a wish,” she says.

//

James sees Larea Thompson, the girl he went to prom with, at the grocery store and wishes her a good weekend. She pulls her three year old closer to her and looks at him like he’s a stranger, like they didn’t get drunk off tiny bottles of tequila she took from her flight attendant mother, like they didn’t kiss in her father’s car at the beach and come home half past two in the morning.

James hikes up Kick-Em Jenny Neck, finds the notebook he’d wedged between the rocks. It’s completely faded, like it’s been up there three hundred years instead of just past ten; the words have worn away, just four remaining: _my name is James_ , his mother’s name gone just as sure as every bit of her is gone from Lucy Ripley. He carries the notebook to the diner and runs his fingers over the blank lines, like his touch will bring the words back, all he knows about his father gone like he never existed. 

“No pickles,” Arla says, jolting him out of his thoughts, and he looks up at her, her eyebrow raised, her pen tapping. He asks her out to dinner.

She says yes.

//

Arla doesn’t meet Lucy for almost two months, and when she does her mouth flattens out into a straight line. Lucy looks Arla up and down and half smiles, excuses herself. James pulls Arla closer by the loops of her jeans and dips his head to breathe in at the hollow of her throat, the subtle tickle of her perfume, blonde hair against his cheek.

“She an ex?”

James laughs, and then bites down on it as her nose flares--danger signs. He kisses her, honeybee chapstick on his lips. “I love you,” he says, and her eyes crinkle when she laughs.

//

James gets stabbed by a drug dealer with beef for the way Lucy took his underaged clients away, stumbling forward against the wall and trying to stay upright. Arla screams behind him, but it’s not a damsel scream--it’s anger, adrenaline. When he turns himself around Arla is there, her arm around his waist. Her torso is streaked heavy with red, the summer blouse he bought her as a just because present, her fingers are wet where she grips his arm.

“I’ll get help,” she says, her breath quick, and James catches her wrist and she goes to leave, his eyes on the slumped over form a few short feet away.

“You killed him,” he says, and he’s thinking of one of the old old stories his mother told him once, one that ended with a gun in a room of metal pipes.

Arla’s fingers clench once around his, and her eyes go from watery to steel. “I’d do anything for you,” she says, and kisses his bloody knuckles before running for help, the slap of her barefeet against the concrete, her heels abandoned in the gutter. James thinks about the ring in his pocket and smiles.

//

Lucy comes into the hotel room in a modest blue dress and smiles at him. She brushes imaginary lint from the shoulders of his suit. “Nervous?”

James fidgets under her hands. “Isn’t everyone?”

“Mm,” Lucy says, and starts to fix his tie. “You love Arla,” she says, “a mother knows her son.” James freezes, and looks at her sideways. She avoids his eyes, smoothes her fingers down his lapels. “I am,” she murmurs, “so proud of you.”

“Thanks,” James says, but the word _mom_ gets stuck in the back of his throat. Her eyes dim a little, but she smiles. Presses a kiss to his forehead, just where his hairline starts.

//

James spasms up against his mother’s hands, feels the floor of the barn against his back. Her fingers clench in his shirt, and she smiles at him through her tears.

“You should have let me die,” he says, “with Arla. One of us should be free.”

“No,” she says, and kisses his forehead, right between his eyes. “My son,” she says, and she says it like she still hasn’t gotten used to it, to him. She shifts until his head is cradled in her lap, her arms around him. “You’re going to live,” she says.

The door thumps loud and that man, the other man stumbles in, panting. James’ vision goes fuzzy around the edges. “You’re going to live,” his mother repeats, “and you’re going to tell me your favourite food, when you got your driver’s license, your first kiss.”

“Mom,” James croaks, “gross.” His mother laughs, half sobbing, and her hair tickles his face, blonde like Arla. White light builds along the walls, crawling towards them.

“Audrey,” the man says, and takes a half step towards them, turning like he can shield them from the light. James forces his eyes open.

“Three short lifetimes with you,” his mother says, brushing his hair behind his ears. “That’s more family than a lot of people get. A lot more love.” She presses her palm over his heart and takes a deep breath. 

James twists until their fingers are tangled together, her smile gone crooked soft. “Three plus one,” he says, and closes his eyes against the light. He lies a widower dying in his mother’s arms, cradled in the heart of Haven, and waits for what happens next..

**Author's Note:**

> ;~~; I hope my recipient enjoys this, and that James and Arla seem fleshed out. This was hard to write, and I hope it didn't seem rushed or stilted.


End file.
